The denunciation of a gerontophobic and ageist society in L’edat dels viu (Univers) by Marc Bosch Oliveras has earned the Crexells prize of the Ateneu Barcelonès for the best work of narrative in Catalan last year, endowed with 6,000 euros and which was convened for the first time now 95 years ago.
“Sometimes I think that the greatest contribution we could make to the Earth would be to extinguish ourselves”, says the author to justify her double dystopia, first with a Garden City in which old age has been left behind but which collapses from coup, and then on an island in Sant Pere where the old dissidents have ended up, dying inexorably.
“In a moment of bewilderment like the present, science fiction prevails again because we live with a feeling of apocalypse”, said the cultural vice-president of the Ateneo, Lluïsa Julià, after making the announcement.
Valèria Gaillard, representing the jury – also made up of Francesco Ardolino, Anna Ballbona, Andreu Gomila, Eva Piquer and Lluïsa Julià -, assessed the “originality, irony, liveliness and a funny point” of a double dystopia “with apocalypse included and nods to authors such as Manuel de Pedrolo or Pere Calders”, and “a dialectic that is put into play between the individual and the collective”, in addition to highlighting “a complex but very well constructed structure with points changing narratives”.
Bosch thanked that the award “gives the book a second life and is a recognition and validation of his career”, and recalled that when he started writing, “with the pandemic over”, he did “what came to him of taste, with the confidence of the editor”, Ester Pujol, who compared it to when you go to the hairdresser and say: “Do what you want”.
About the novel, the writer, current head of studies at the Aula d’Escriptura de Girona in place of the ill-fated Vicenç Pagès Jordà, insisted that “it is not a pandemic book”. Graduated in Philosophy, she found a spark in Bernard de Fontenelle’s work La república de los filosofos or La historia de los ajaoianos (Palamedes), which fascinated her, but she was also inspired by works such as Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Voltaire’s Candide, with a bookend of adventures and thought, with subversion of philosophical theories, from a distorted Epicureanism to “some Christianized Stoics passed by a kind of capitalism”, to make a “criticism of the manipulation of power”. “It’s a text that goes from illustrated references to pop”, he points out, and explains that the island where the protagonist ends up is also called Illa Bonica and they sing La Isla Bonita de madonna According to the writer, “it’s a novel that deals with many topics, but it has a bite-sized style, it’s not complicated”. He also expressed the wish that “the genre should not weigh more than the literary will, with a clear commitment to language”.
Bosch has also explained that before writing the book “I thought that I could not make a protagonist more unfortunate than the one in La dona effervescent 2020), but seeing how it progressed he saw that he was wrong, because his Elisa Neri sees how he collapses his perfect society and ends up in another where everyone dies.
The award will be presented this Thursday afternoon in an event at the Ateneo in which Eva Piquer will interview the winner and the actress Carme Elias will read fragments of the award-winning work.
